1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to the field of electronic communications, and more particularly to a system and method for allocating contact resources for use by contact resource users.
2. Description of the Related Art
Telephone contact centers have grown in number over the past several years with greater reliance by businesses on contact centers for sales, marketing and customer service. In fact, worldwide the call center market is predicted to grow at a 16% annual compound rate, with some estimates of as high as 3.7 million contact center agents employed in the United States by 2004. Even greater growth rates are expected in less mature markets, such as the European Union, Latin America and Asia. Contact centers generally use electronic communications, such as the telephone, to initiate outbound contacts or respond to inbound contacts with customers or potential customers.
In telephone contact centers, contact agents typically establish voice communications with contacted individuals by using automated contact devices. For instance, predictive dialers dial outbound contact attempts and forward successful contacts to agents at a rate designed to keep agents occupied talking with contacts. Automated Call Distributor (ACD) and interactive voice response units (IVR) accept inbound contact attempts by callers and forward the inbound attempts to agents as the agents become available. However, automatic contact devices are expensive to purchase and maintain. Further, hiring, training and retaining agents to respond to contacts represent a substantial investment in labor, with labor representing the majority of the cost of running a call center operation.
Typical business needs for contact resources are often better served by outsourcing the contact resource needs to third parties. For instance, businesses may prefer to allocate capital to core competencies rather than for the purchase of contact devices. However, in purchasing contact resources businesses typically show a great deal of caution since customer attrition or lost sales from poor service by contact agents typically costs more than servicing costs themselves. When purchasing contact resources, buyers tend to err towards higher cost services either by accepting the much higher costs of direct support of contact resources or purchasing contact resources from more expensive recognized brand companies with whom they have a positive work experience. Even more expensive service is no guarantee of good quality contact service. Conversely, sellers of outsourced contact resources have difficultly making inroads with contact resource users. Thus, sellers of contact resources face slow growth and substantial investments in brand and image building until buyers of contact resources recognize the sellers and associate quality service with them.